99% Invisible - 158- Sandhogs

Episode Date: March 31, 2015

Eighty years ago, New York City needed another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge could no longer handle the mounting traffic between New Jersey and Manhattan. Thus began construction of the Lincoln Tunnel. But this is not a … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We have something a little different on the show this week. If it isn't obvious, I'm what you'd call pro infrastructure. Of course, some infrastructure is vital and necessary and some infrastructure isn't, but it all has to be made right. It's hard work, it's dangerous work, and it's often union work. This story is about New York City Sandhog's local 147, and they are the urban miners who build every tunnel in New York City and many of the bridge foundations.

Without them, there would be no sewers, no subways, no tunnels for cars, no water, basically no New York City. To quote the local 147 website, without the tunnels built by the Sandhogs, New York would have ceased to exist around the time of the American Civil War. local 147 website without the tunnels built by the Sandhawks, New York would have ceased to exist around the time of the American Civil War. So in 1994, radio producer Dan Klauson interviewed the Sandhawks as they were working on New York City Water Tunnel No. 3, and if you've seen the third diehard movie, Diehard with Evidence, you've seen New York City Water Tunnel No. 3 under construction.

It's pretty amazing to see, and the voices of the Sandhawks responsible for building that tunnel are amazing to hear. Seriously, I can listen to them talk all day, but on this episode we'll just listen for 22 minutes. This is Sandhawks by Long Hall Productions produced in 1994 by Dan Colossan. Through the heart of a great metropolis, close the mighty Hudson River, a natural barrier between two states, a challenge to man's ingenuity, skill, and courage. Sixty years ago, the challenge was to build another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland tunnel and the George Washington bridge could no longer handle the mounting traffic between New Jersey and Manhattan. And so the Lincoln tunnel is started.

It was 1934, the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. In my day, when you were hungry, it would be anything. And to be a sandhog in Jim Murth's day, you had to work almost exclusively in compressed air. Air that was pumped into small, cramped underground chambers or casons to hold back the water and silt during tunneling. Under pressure work is a strain on hot and lungs. There is danger also of contracting an illness called the Benz. My early life I had trouble with the burns in my news. You had a way of curing it at home. you get into a hot cup of water and it would disappear and then you'd fall asleep, the water would get cold, it'd come right back and hit you,

like a toothache, a very, very bad toothache. It's the same problem deep seed divers have when they come up to the surface too fast. Severe cramps, and in some cases paralysis, they can even lead to death. Around the turn of the century during construction of the Pennsylvania railroad tunnels, the bends took the lives of at least 50 sandhogs. Initially, the men were declared dead of natural causes. Later, it was revealed that the death certificates had been falsified to cover up unsafe working conditions. Public hearings led to public outrage, and eventually a sandhog's union was born. We didn't have the union would have nothing. Believe me when I tell you absolutely nothing. You think there would be any kind of wages or any kind of conditions that the contractor was gonna give you? A rich man got rich because he

was holding on. It was money. He isn't gonna give it away to a bunch of slabs. So the union came in. I'm going to read the title of the local, but you must remember that we came from an international union of compressed air workers. That's why the title is compressed air and free air tunnels, foundations, casings, subways, sewer, confidam, construction workers union of New York, New Jersey, states, and vicinity. That's the title. Edward McGuinness is a former president of the Sandhogs Union, local 147 for short.

McGuinness's father was a sandhog, a foreman, and as a kid growing up across the street from the bar where his father recruited his work crew, young Eddie decided he wanted nothing to do with the business. The banging on the bar and the fights that went on there, I was petrified. I never thought I would go near anybody that was a sandhog, never mind working for them. But despite his vow to stay away, Eddie McGinnis, like a lot of sandhogs, ended up following

his father down into the tunnels. Economics decides a lot of our lives. And it decided mine. I know the first time I went into a tunnel and they set off a blast of about 200 sticks of powder. I said, what, and the name of God brought me to this place. That was my reaction. I'm going home and never coming back.

But when I went home, I had young children, and I had to come back. And John's everything else is good? Yeah. How you feeling, Patty? John's everything else is good? Yeah. How you feeling, Patty? Good. You doing all right? Yeah.

Good man, Pat. 10 years ago, there were 2,300 members of local 147, headquartered here in a small office in the Bronx. Today, there are only about 700 members, and almost half of those are pensioners. All are men. Richard Fitzsimons is the business manager for local 147. We had women, they did go down, there was I think three women, and they worked alongside,

they've done the best they could, but they didn't come back after lunch, it was just the work too tough. I'm a firm believer that a woman should do whatever she can in life to support herself, but I don't think that San Hg is a place for a woman. I might put it this way, I wouldn't want to see my wife with my daughter, San Hogg. His son is another matter. Richie Fitzsimont started working as a sand hog six days after he graduated from high school.

Today, he's the president of local 147. It's basically a father's son union. Just about everybody has either had their father, or their brother is a sandhog, or their cousin, and it's a small, but a tight knit union, and the union is in such a way that it's almost like an extended family. And local 147 is a union that has long prided itself

on its racial and ethnic diversity. Yeah, Tom McHugh's my name. I'm a son talk. has long prided itself on its racial and ethnic diversity. I was born, born, raised in Brooklyn, and I live down in Jersey shore right now. And when I was in Sanhawk 30 years, I was born in by a fellow named Charlie Dirty, Donnie Goalboy, and a lot of Donnie Goalboys in his local. Same as we do have West Indy and Jamaicans, Polish. We have a good contingency Polish fellows from Queens. My name is Lin Kone Ritchets. I am from St. Vincent West Indies, and I've been a sunhawk for 23 years. Lincoln Richards speaks almost reverentially

about the unity of local 147 that no matter how they might feel about each other above ground, down below, sandhawgs are like family. Very close. You can just finish fighting with a man in the change house. You get on the elevator and you go down to work and it's your brother. It shares last meal with you. It shares anything with you. It look out for you. You know, anything he do for you. That's how beautiful a relationship we have.

We had integration, so to speak, before any of this ever came out about integration, but what we even knew about integration Huey Bar worked as a sandhog for 35 years before retiring in 1987 You know, you could work with Pollock's I was Irish Irish American I'd work in Pollock gangs and what have you you know black gangs also That was the method of operation. It was our work rules. It was our work rules It's always been that way since San Haga. In New York, one of the most important work rules, if not the most important, is that you have to have a union card to work as a sandhawk. But being in the union doesn't guarantee a job.

Tunnel work is scarce these days. Several hundred members of local 147 are out of work. Most of those who do have jobs are working on City Tunnel No. 3, a massive construction project that when finished will give much of New York City a brand new water system. City Tunnel No. 3 is badly needed. New York's existing water system, some of which dates back to the turn of the century, is so antiquated, City officials are reluctant to turn off the valves to inspect the tunnels because they're afraid the valves are so corroded they won't be able to turn them back on again. A small part of city tunnel number three is shaft 21b beneath the heart of Brooklyn.

You ready for the drill bucket? Yes, that's it. Okay. It's early on a Monday morning and a crew of sandhogs is about to go to work inside Chaff 21b, 500 feet below street level. Oh, we're getting ready to go down the drull now. I'm going to be drulling for maybe three or four hours. And then we get the dynamite down there, it will be blasting.

We use about 300 pounds of dynam of the anyways. For a blast. Good job, good job. The crew is off to a slow start this morning. There is an electrical problem, so it's pitch black at the bottom of the shaft. No lights, Dennis. Can't check the paddle. The problem is quickly fixed, and the first group of sandhugs dressed in hard hats and bright yellow rain slickers steps inside a metal cage and descends. Give me one kiss and I'll be happy.

All right, load it up. load it up. I'm back door's closed. Yes, it is. All right. All right. Go down. The next sound you're about to hear is

men in cage going down. Men in motion. For most sandhawks, the first trip into a shaft or tunnel was the moment of truth, the point at which they knew whether or not they had what it takes to be in the business. You can tell the minute you step on a cage and you start going down, whether you do or you don't have it in it. Mike Jimenez grew up not too far from this site. For as long as he can remember Jimenez says he wanted to be a sandhog. People are mesmerized by the saying what did you do and

we tell him we boldly go with no man has ever gone before. We've come across Virgin Rock. This rock has been here since the beginning of time. Nobody's ever done this before. Not every sandhog shares this romantic view of the work. Charlie Cannon is a second-generation sandhog. It's more economic than there's anything else. We don't come here for the glory of being the first one to be where nobody else has walked. It's basic economic. You've got to feed your family, pay your bills, and try to get ahead in this life. That's the whole picture. Whether they work for the glory or the paycheck,

sandhogs work together in extremely close quarters. Here at the bottom of Shaft 21B, 10 sandhogs and a battery of heavy equipment are packed into a space about the size of a large hot tub. The walls are jagged rock, granite, quartz, limestone, illuminated by a panel of floodlights. As you can tell it's cramped. Sa'dine. So this is what it's like to be a life of a Sa'dine? Yes. Close to it. Yeah baby, you don't get any better than this stuff. It's like working at the bottom of an empty missile side in a rain forest.

Groundwater pours down from the rock walls above, collecting in need-deep pools below where the sandhogs are getting ready to drill. They pull out big, pneumatic jackhammers, attach long drill bits, and start boring holes for the dynamite. The opening at the top of the shaft, 65 stories up, looks like a pinhole. If something were to fall from above, even a small rock or a hard hat, it could be deadly.

It's like being in a funnel. There's no escape. There's no escape from anything that falls. It was into a shaft similar to this one, shaft 19 in Queens, that something did fall, something big. Last November, the day before Thanksgiving, a 16-ton winch broke loose from its mooring at the top of the shaft. Tom Flanagan and Mike Boyce were two of eight sandhawks who were working 450 feet below on a catwalk

about 50 feet from the bottom when the huge winch plummeted downward. We know all of a sudden notice that cable got slack real fast and we looked up and all we see was this big snake coming out. It's the cable that's coming. And we couldn't see the surface due to the fog. So the cable was beating us up real bad, knocking everybody all about. And that big, big winch come through

and all hell broke loose. Everything was flying all over and had no warning at all. He had a...I seen flashes out of the corner, am I right? I sounded like an explosion. Did that broke loose? And I was at my foot caught in a cable, my fingers and a grate hanging upside down. I was going to drop in a water or pick a brick while fall because I was slipping and like it's all the other guys I thought of my two kids and turn my hand around and the grate and stuck it in again and just let my foot loosen the

cable and itch my way up to a good cable and pull myself up on the deform. I managed to get up to a flat piece of deck and just hang on, it'll piece a post on a guardrail and just hope them prayed until the dust settled until everything stopped coming. We were all very lucky that made it out of there. I just wish Anthony could have been as lucky as the rest of us. Anthony Odo was the 20th sandhog to be killed during construction of the water tunnel. That averages out to almost one fatality a year.

You come here today to pray for the heroic men and women who made such tremendous sacrifices that the people of the city of New York would have water, life-giving water, for all the days of their lives and for generations yet to come. At St. Barnabas Church in the North Bronx, on senior coincidine holds a special mass each year in memory of the Sandhogs killed working on the water project. And so now we'll list the names of those if you stand as a tribute to men who have suffered a sacrifice for the work of our tunnel. Charles Specky Amina, Joseph Barton, the operating engineer, Stuart Birdzall. The first guy got killed on the water tunnel construction.

Got killed about 20 feet away from me on a walk there. To hear that man moan with the pain. It was something, I mean, you know, I'll never forget that as long as I live you'll be Jay Horton minor Thanks sir one accident. I'll never forget brother in battery tunnel happened on Easter Saturday They put a guy on a motor That tunnel really had a bad slope and the great wonder about four degrees They were shutting the inside the lock

He came down with the motor he couldn't stop at the breakman jump, broke his leg, he hit the door, the battery jumped up, caught him in half. They come in and they got Andy and Andy took me with him and went over and put him in a sack and brought him out. I vomited the whole night. Yeah And that's what I would like to do. That's it. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. For every sandhawk who is killed on the job, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of close calls.

The most legendary took place in 1916. As the story goes, Marshall maybe was working in compressed air in a tunnel below the East River. There was a blowout. Maybe in two other sand dogs were shot out through a hole and up through the riverbed on a geyser, 25 feet high. They were mining and they didn't have the equipment in there and up to stop that blow.

And he tried to stop it and he went up through the river with two other guys. And he survived. The other two went died. The story seemed to catch attention because Marshall maybe went back. He was in a long-time college hospital. I think he only spent a couple of days in the hospital. And he was back working as quick as he could.

I tell you, you talk to most sandbags and they're going to tell you, one of your times up, your times up. Whether you're walking down the street or working underground, just going to go. You're going to go. When the man says it's time, you're gone. That's all. Simple as that. Just wasn't his time. Stuart Williams thought it was his time a while back.

He was working on a subway job when suddenly the tunnel caved in. Stuart, whose only five foot three in ways less than 130 pounds, was nearly crushed to death. Damn, just feeling I ever had. I saw the most beautiful light on my way, my kids just just cleared the day and I passed out. I woke up in the hospital. I broke my leg, my back just threw the head cut open, broke the collarbone shoulder.

But 8 weeks later, I remember it. 8 weeks. These days Stewart works above ground as a supervisor. Tonight he's directing a 650-pound dynamite blast at chaff 22, part of the water tunnel project in Brooklyn. Chaff 22 is wedged between the Brooklyn Queen's expressway and a row of low-income apartments that look down on the site. It's surrounded by loops of razor wire and bathed in high-intensity floodlights. Stuart blows a whistle once to warn people living in the apartment that an explosion is five minutes away. Dynamite blasts are in almost daily occurrence here. Still, Stuart is anxious. He's pacing back

and forth, smoking a cigarette, nervously pushing the plunger on the empty detonator in and out, and greeting men as they come out of the shaft. How much possible for these men, man. Thank God, that's all I would. I've never hurt one in my life. I've had one get hurt working with me, and I don't want to start now. The one-minute warning, fire officials on hand to monitor the blast, move in closer and put their ear plugs in place. After 35 years of drilling and blasting, Stuart wears hearing aids in both ears. Well, when I started, they didn't have a ear protection they have now.

They tried to tear a rag off for sure for sticking in your ear. The countdown is finally over. Stuart hands the detonator to the blast man who shouts out the final warning. Fire in the hole! Sound is good, sound is good. We'll know when we get down there. That's one of the things about shooting. You never know when you get back down there, what you got.

I got to get the fan. He turns on the fan to clear the smoke out of the tunnel and heads for the Sandhog's locker room, the hog house, located in a nearby trailer for some barbecued ribs and a game of gin rumummy. I love it. I love it. Comerati with the man, the people, I've met some of the greatest people in the world. Worked with some of the greatest people in the world. And you get in and you get into your blood after a while. It's really all you want to do. There is a price Sandhog's pay for this love of the tunnels. You age, you age in the hole, so to speak. Many retired sandhogs, Huey Bar is one of them, suffer from silicosis, from years of breathing

rock dust down in the tunnels, and caesons disease, a deterioration of the bone from working in compressed air. It puts a heart in on your body, so to speak. You can ask any of the old-timeers that joints hurt, you know, you're raking, you're raking. I don't think there's anyone who works as hard as a hog. Two men would load about a yard of sand in about two and a half to three minutes and this goes on continuously for six hours without a stop. I don't think there's

only one that stands up with that kind of work. But I never regret it coming in and I'm never ashamed of being what I am. And this is what I am. When the ribbon cutting ceremony is finally held for City Tunnel No. 3, scheduled for completion in the year 2025, most of the sandhogs working on the project will have either retired or have died. 61-year-old Lincoln Richards may not be around, but he says there's satisfaction in just knowing he was part of it. Every time I go down and I come out after eight hours, I say, well, I've made my contribution. And to know what you're doing is that people would be able to enjoy it in the future.

Yes, this is something that after I die and go on, it would be still there. Because we're doing something that New York City would always have for the duration. Eddie McGinnis-Fat looks at another way. Eliminate all the tunnels the sand hogs have built over the years the Lincoln the Holland the Brooklyn battery the Long Island and Pennsylvania railroads the subways and you get an idea of the extent to which sand hogs help build New York well a picture a picture of New York City if you will what barges going across bring them people

across and ferries and the best ferry system in the world can carry about 80,000 people in a rush hour. That's like from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. A tunnel can do that in 20 minutes. Without that progress of people coming back and forth, Manhattan would be a dead island. Manhattan would have been nothing. Why would you build anything for if you couldn't get people in and out? Three years and seven months it took to complete one tube of the Lincoln tunnel.

It opened to traffic December 22, 1937. Through the Lincoln tunnel, traffic moves with speed and safety 100 feet below the river. A new link joins the states of New Jersey and New York, a great engineering piece, a great highway, a new conquest of the Hudson. St. Hawks was produced by Dan Collison for Long Hall Productions. Long Hall Productions is Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister. You can listen to all their stories and they got ton of great ones at longhallpro.org.

99% Invisible is St. Green Sppan, Katie Mingle, Avery, Troubleman, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW, San Francisco, and produced of the offices of ArcSide, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter and Instagram too. And we have a new episode from Avery next week and you'll find it first at 99pi.org. Radio Topee from PRX. Tokyo.

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